


shadows suspended on dust

by folignos



Category: Generation Kill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-20
Updated: 2013-04-20
Packaged: 2017-12-09 00:26:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/767842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folignos/pseuds/folignos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"‘How did it make you feel?’ Colbert asks him. Ray smokes and smokes and never answers and ignores the half smile on Colbert’s face." Hannibal AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	shadows suspended on dust

**Author's Note:**

> Like most things in my life, this is Harri's fault. Blame her.  
> Title from NBC's Hannibal, s01e02

i.

‘How did it make you _feel_?’ the shrink asks, and Ray looks up at him from where he’s rolling himself a cigarette, clumsy and lumpy from the bandages on his palm.

‘Fuckin’ fantastic, homes,’ he snarls back, and digs in his pocket for a lighter. When one is waved under his nose, silver and heavy and engraved, he stands up, and paces around the room, cigarette pinched between his lips. Colbert watches him, cool and clean and put together in his suit, charcoal grey with millimetre wide pinstripes and a maroon shirt that makes Ray think of spilt red wine and bloody knuckles. Ray flicks ash off the end of his cigarette into an ornate bowl and watches the minute twitch on Colbert’s face.

ii.

Ray needs glasses, always has, but when his mother bought him his first pair and suddenly he could see everyone’s faces, could see them looking at him, and he smashes them in a panic, tells her it was an accident. She slaps him hard across the jaw anyway and won’t buy him anymore.

He wears his glasses when he’s teaching, when he’s at crime scenes, but mostly they stay hidden in the inside pocket of whatever crumpled jacket he’s wearing that day. He realised when he was ten that if he couldn’t see faces, he couldn’t make eye contact, and it’s still one of the best tricks he has up his sleeve.

He wears his glasses to talk to Colbert. He doesn’t know why.

iii.

‘How did it make you feel?’ Colbert asks him. Ray smokes and smokes and never answers and ignores the half smile on Colbert’s face.

iv.

Ray likes dogs. Dogs are easier than people. They’re always smiling, and they love Ray on the condition that he remembers to feed them and let them out in the yard every morning and night.

People need a lot more than bowls of dry food and loping runs through the garden twice a day.

He’s doesn’t know why that’s so hard for people to understand.

v.

‘How did it make you feel?’ Colbert asks. His suit is dark blue today, with a pristine white shirt and an open collar. Ray can see his collarbones jutting out.

Ray licks his lips and sparks his lighter but nothing comes out. He refuses Colbert’s again and spends the rest of the session pacing and fiddling with a pen he picks up from Colbert’s desk, a cheap red biro without a lid. He didn’t think Colbert would deign to be seen using something so common, so easily bought. He turns it over and over in his hands, and doesn’t notice the red scribbles left by the point.

vi.

The first time Ray killed someone, he was twenty four years old, and he’d been stabbed in the leg first. He threw up, afterwards, because apparently it was a day of fucking clichés.

He remembers the thrill rushing through him, remembers the adrenaline kick of feeling the gun come alive in his hand, watching the scarlet spreading through the streets. It was raining.

He remembers the shrink he was sent to then, as well, small and female and deliberately non-threatening. She smiled and said all the right things and scribbled on her sunshine yellow legal pad.

He slept with her for six weeks after she signed him off for active duty. He thinks he still has the letter somewhere, crumpled in a box full of things that he never bothered to unpack.

He still has the letter from the second shrink he was sent to when he got shot in the gut and left to die. When Colbert signs him off this time, maybe he should start a collection. Get them framed or something.

First though, he has to put up with him asking how shit makes Ray feel, week in, week out.

vii.

‘How did it make you feel?’ Colbert asks, and Ray bites back from where he’s standing on the 360 degree balcony of Colbert’s office, ‘How did it make _you_ feel?’

Ray figures he must have said something right, judging by the slow smile on Colbert’s face. He writes something down on a sheet of paper lying on his desk. Ray watches the long fingers and the wide palm and thinks about watching it close around that girl’s throat, thinks about the cuff of the white shirt he was wearing turning red and then brown.

He paces again, right round the balcony until he’s standing behind and above Colbert’s desk. He looks down to see the sheet of paper, half filled with notes in careful cursive, and Ray’s too high up to read it, but he tries anyway, and ends up with eye strain and a headache for his trouble, but he also ends up with a letter telling him he’s fit for active duty.

viii.

Ray dreams of stags and dead girls and blood on his hands the colour of the walls of Colbert’s office.

He wakes up with two dogs on his bed and a third standing guard at the door, ears pricked and tail down, and when he looks out of his window at the full moon illuminated garden and sees the torn up turf, he wonders how much of it was a dream. He doesn’t sleep much that night, just lies on his back and lets the sweat dry stiff on his skin. At six fourteen am, his phone rings and he blinks slowly, gets up to make coffee and lets the dogs out before driving to Maryland.

He meets a faceless suit at the scene who walks him through it, and he starts in the middle of the house, resting on the balls of his feet, eyes sliding shut as he sinks into the mind of the killer.

He kills the father first, silently, quickly, slicing his knife across the throat and cutting the jugular. He dies in seconds. The mother is harder, he steps on a creaky floorboard and she looks up, takes a beat, and screams. He stabs her between the ribs. It’s messy and indelicate, but it gets the job done. The oldest child, a daughter, is seventeen and heavily pregnant. He slits her throat, too, she’s slow and clumsy with the weight of her unborn child. The younger daughter is sleeping in her bed. He leaves her be, and prowls through the house looking for the middle child, a boy with metal through his lip and eyebrow. He’s wearing headphones and plucking at a guitar, doesn’t even look up when Ray comes in the room. He stabs him three times in the chest and dips his hands in the pool of blood.

He slips back into his own skin and finds himself in the boy’s bedroom, crouched over the same pool of blood, crusty at the sides. The room smells like salt and rust, and he stands, heads for the little girl’s bedroom and for once, doesn’t know what he’s going to find. There are drops of blood leading down the hall and smears of blood on the walls, but when he reaches her room, there’s nothing.

He looks inside and finds nothing. An unmade bed, and no little girl. He heads back downstairs, scans the crowd for the least stupid looking agent and that’s when he sees Colbert in a great black overcoat and a grey scarf, talking to Ray’s boss. Colbert looks up at exactly the wrong moment, sees Ray staring at him and does that slow smile again, the one that makes Ray feel like he’s a dog who just did a trick in exchange for a treat. Ray heads straight for him without really meaning to and slips his glasses off automatically. ‘Where’s the little girl?’ he says to his boss, who looks at him like he’s just asked if he can take a shit on the carpet, so Ray repeats his question, slowly and loudly, like he’s speaking to an idiot.

They don’t know. Of course they don’t. Ray rolls up the sleeves of his crumpled shirt and wishes for a cup of coffee.

They find her in the woods. Alive, barely, with slashes on her arms and legs and chest. Ray wraps her up in his shirt and carries her to the ambulance, Colbert at his back like a shadow.

ix.

‘How did it make you feel?’ Colbert asks, and this isn’t a session, and Ray’s still wearing a t-shirt stained with the blood of a little girl who died on the way to hospital, and so when he tells Colbert to go fuck himself between inhalations of cigarette smoke, it doesn’t feel real when Colbert laughs at him. Ray’s hands are shaking, so Colbert’s driving him home, folding himself elegantly into a car that’s only just big enough to Ray, really, and Ray’s still shaking as he lights cigarettes with a matchbook he found in the glove compartment, blowing smoke out of the open window.

After another half hour of silence, Ray’s smoked one and a half cigarettes, and he asks, voice hoarse with smoke and hands shaking from nicotine instead of adrenaline, ‘why did you sign me off for active duty?’

Colbert keeps his eyes on the road. ‘Because there was no reason not to.’

Ray considers that all the way home.

x.

Ray dreams of the men he’s killed and the men he’s wanted to, and when he wakes up and sees them standing in his front yard one morning, he knows he’s not dreaming, but he doesn’t know whether he wants them to be a hallucination or not.

xi.

Colbert’s not with a patient when Ray storms in with the letter signing him off for active duty and slams it down on the desk. Colbert looks up at him and says nothing, and Ray paces, and he can’t even roll a cigarette; his hands are shaking too much, and Colbert still says nothing, and Ray still paces until he throws his lighter on the floor and collapses into the armchair he normally sits in, head in his hands. ‘Why did you sign me off?’ he says, and hears Colbert settle into the seat opposite him. He’s wearing a pale grey suit with a forest green shirt today, and a tie such a dark green that it might as well be black.

‘Are you saying there’s a reason you shouldn’t have been?’ Colbert asks, and Ray wants to scream.

‘I’m seeing fucking dead people,’ he says eventually.

‘Who?’ Colbert uncrosses his legs, leans forward, just a little.

‘Does it matter?’

‘Of course it does.’

‘The guy I shot.’ When he looks up at Colbert, Colbert’s smiling.

‘Is that all?’

‘Should there be something worse?’ Ray snaps, getting up and pacing again. Colbert shrugs.

‘It’s a perfectly normal reaction to this sort of thing.’ Colbert’s slight accent seems more pronounced, only a little, not even enough for Ray to pinpoint an origin beyond Eastern Europe, but it’s there and it’s different, and Ray latches onto it.

‘This sort of thing,’ he repeats, mocks.

‘You killed someone. You’re displacing him onto other people, onto the emotions you may have felt killing him. How did killing him make you feel?’

There’s that question again. Ray hates that question. He stops pacing, returns to his seat and drops into it heavily. ‘Good,’ he says, looking at his hands. He’s glad he’s not wearing his glasses. ‘It felt really fucking good, okay? Just like the last time, and the time before that.’

Ray has only killed three people, not counting the crime scenes he reimagines so realistically his hands feel tacky with blood. He’s dreamt of killing dozens, wakes up hard and nauseous and feeling alive. He swallows hard and looks at Colbert. For the first time, he can’t read the expression on his face. He clenches and unclenches his fists, thinks about how the recoil from the gun leaves his palm numb, thinks about the smell of the gunpowder. ‘Is it keeping you from doing your job?’ Colbert asks, and Ray thinks about that. Really thinks, and then shakes his head. Colbert retrieves the letter from his desk and gives it back to Ray, folded neatly in half again. Ray licks dry lips, takes it, and leaves.

xii.

Ray kills a serial rapist with his bare hands. Beats him bloody and broken and it feels so fucking good he smiles while he’s doing it.

xiii.

Colbert watches him do it, stands by him like one of his dogs, guarding him, and when Ray stands up, entire body like a wire without protective casing, he grips Ray by the back of the back and pushes their foreheads together and looks into Ray’s eyes. Forces him to stop, think, breathe, and it should be horrible, it should be violating and terrible and it should make Ray stiffen, but it doesn’t. His hands with scuffed knuckles tremble, but he’s breathing. He’s calm, and he’s there, and so is Colbert, and they’re both grinning, and Ray can feel the high better than anything he smoked or swallowed of injected during college.

He sits in the passenger seat of Colbert’s car, sleek and foreign and silver, and he waits for his hands to stop shaking.

xiv.

Colbert’s apartment is just like his car, sleek and foreign. Ray sits on a barstool in the kitchen as Colbert cooks, places a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon down in front of him. Ray eats mechanically and can’t remember the last time he had something that didn’t come from a can. When the plate is empty, Ray looks at his hands and flinches at the mass of purple and split skin, and then he jolts with realisation. ‘The body,’ he says, and Colbert just picks the plate up and takes it to the sink.

‘Taken care of,’ he says, in such a voice that Ray accepts it automatically, without question, and he drinks the last of the tea Colbert placed in front of him.

‘Wait,’ he says suddenly. ‘How is it taken care of?’

Colbert’s answer is a grin that makes Ray shiver with the same intensity that killing that man had.

xv.

Ray cleans up his knuckles in Colbert’s bathroom, spattering translucent red water on the stainless steel of the sink and the grey tiles. There’s still a fine trembling in his hands, but he grips the rim of the sink and closes his eyes and breathes for a few seconds, and when he lets go, they’re steady. He looks in the mirror and sees Colbert standing in the doorway, watching him. Ray shuts off the water without looking and he’s not wearing his glasses, Colbert’s blurry, but it’s the closest to eye contact he’s going to get.

xvi.

In Baltimore, Colbert kills a woman who attacked Ray, left three bloody scores down his face. He breaks her neck and the crack is loud in the aftermath of her screaming. Ray doesn’t question it, and the degree to which he trusts Colbert is starting to scare him.

xvii.

In Baton Rouge, he starts calling Colbert Brad. Doesn’t know why, just does. He rolls it around his tongue before swallowing the last mouthful of his sandwich, and he watches that same old smile that he’s used to spreading across Brad’s face.

xviii.

In Miami, Brad tells Ray he’s a serial killer, and Ray is completely unsurprised. A kid who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time is their first kill together, and Ray tangles his hand with Brad’s, both slippery with blood and viscera, and smiles.

When they fuck against the side of a building, Brad smears red over Ray’s ribcage and down the notches of his spine as he bites at his shoulder hard enough to bruise.

xix.

The cops come after them. Of course they do.

They kill the first one, and the second, and then they vanish, leaving Virginia with Ray’s dogs and not much else. The west coast is almost untouched by them, and Ray eats salad with what he thinks is chicken and later finds out is the rapist he killed months ago.

He thought he’d feel more disgust that he does, when really, he just clicks the lid back on the empty tub, lights a cigarette and rolls down the window of Brad’s car to flick ash out of.

xx.

Brad taught him to hide a body, to kill easily and efficiently and quickly, and now he teaches him how to cook, how to harvest the best cuts of meat from a person. Ray detaches from the body in front of him, just sees a slab of meat, like the carcass of a pig or a cow. It all tastes the same, and Brad tells him it’s not murder if you use every part of the body.

Ray believes him because he’s believed everything else so far, and because this gives him the same kind of thrill that watching the light bleed out of someone’s eyes does, and because what does Brad gain from lying to him at this point?

So they fuck and kill and butcher and cook together, and the cops will catch them eventually, Ray’s almost certain, but right now all that matters is Brad’s hands bruising his wrists and Brad’s hands showing him how to hold a filleting knife and aren’t they pretty much the same thing, anyway?


End file.
